George Turtle won this book as a prize when he was a pupil at Croydon High School for Boys.

It was a prize for being top of his class.George was brought up as a boy but did not develop as one.George felt different.

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Georgina Somerset

Georgina remembers being brought up as a boy in Croydon:

"They were in fact three weeks deciding what to register me as and as it proved, they registered me as a boy incorrectly.

Throughout my years -we never spoke about sex. Sex was something you never talked about. There was never a query about whether I was right as a boy or not, I was just indoctrinated, I was taught how to be a boy."

"Manner wise, in habits, I'd even think as a boy, and that's what you did, boys do this and boys don't do that and I just fitted in.

I was always a very docile child. Of course I realise nowI didn't have any testosterone to make me aggressive.

Anything to do with guns or war or fighting, I didn't want to know."

"I felt very much out of place sometimes and I must say I did feel at times they'd made a mistake and I thought somehow, somewhere along the line, there would be a God who would come along and put it right. I'd no idea how that would happen, but I thought they must have made a mistake, or somebody had made a mistake, in registering me because I always liked what the girls liked and didn't like what the boys liked."

"Well, I went to Reigate Grammar Schooland it was there when I was changing for gym, that - for the first time in my life -I saw a boy nude for the first time."

"And it's then I realised obviously, he was what, seventeen, three years through puberty or something like that, and I was seventeen and I had no development whatever, I just had this tiny little phallus. And it was only then, when I saw a boy full frontal nude for the first time, that I realised in factthat I wasn't a boy and wasn't going to be a boy."

Going through a correction of sex

Baby Turtle was born of indeterminate sexin 1923.

Puberty passed George by.Developing neither male or female sexual secondary characteristicsled to feelings of isolation and confusion.George was diagnosed as a hermaphrodite in 1950s.

At the age of 34and after taking medical advice, Georgina had corrective surgery.Her birth certificate was finally corrected in 1960.

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